Donald Trump‘s White House had a plan to put migrants on buses and release them into sanctuary cities, where governments had committed not to give up undocumented immigrants for deportation, reports said Thursday.
However, the plan was abandoned after it encountered opposition from numerous parties — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the president’s own homeland security secretary.
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The Washington Post was first to report on a plan, advanced at least twice by the White House in the past six months, to send detained migrants to “small- and mid-sized sanctuary cities.”
The plan, which was raised as recently as February, was aimed at freeing up detention space but it also would have targeted the president’s rivals in the Democratic Party.
One place that White House officials wanted to release detainees was in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s district in San Francisco, the Post reported, quoting anonymous Homeland Security officials and emails.
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CNN also reported on the plan Thursday — an anonymous source told the broadcaster that Trump had directly pressured former homeland security secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to adopt the plan, but that she resisted the idea.
A legal team working for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) analyzed the plan legally and decided it wouldn’t work — that, said CNN’s source, is what killed it altogether.
The plan’s rejection reportedly angered White House senior advisor Stephen Miller, an immigration hardliner who is believed to have the president’s ear on border policy.
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The plan was proposed twice in the past six months, according to the Post.
First, in a Nov. 16 email that asked officials at numerous agencies — including ICE — whether it could be done.
ICE, however, resisted the idea, concerned about its cost as well as possible liabilities and public relations risks.
Matthew Albence, ICE’s acting deputy director, wrote in an email that a plan like this one would “create an unnecessary operational burden.”
He was also worried that liability could raise if a bus were to become involved in an accident on the way to sanctuary cities.
The White House raised the plan with ICE again in February, but the agency’s legal department rejected it.
It’s no longer being considered, said statements to the Post from both ICE and the White House.
“This was just a suggestion that was floated and rejected, which ended any further discussion,” said the White House’s statement.
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Miller was miffed that lawyers with DHS didn’t offer legal advice that would make the plan work, CNN reported.
The senior advisor has pushed for the White House to fire DHS general counsel John Mitnick, and his anger with the legal department is one reason why he sought this, the network said.
Mitnick still works for DHS, but Nielsen resigned as homeland security secretary after Trump asked her to.
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Nielsen’s resignation came as waves of Central American migrants have continued to approach the U.S. border.
News of the plan came as March saw more than 100,000 apprehensions and inadmissibles at the southwest border in March — the most it has seen in a single month in six years.
Out of that number, over 92,000 were apprehended.
- With files from Reuters